This is a subsequence to a paper entitled On the teaching of modern Chinese sentence patterns in TCSL (No.3, 1999, Chinese Teaching in the World ) on functional sentence patterns. It discusses a new solution to the problems of how sentence functions can be formalized and how sentence forms can be functionalized. It specifies more features of functional sentence patterns than the previous paper.
The goal of TCSL is the improvement of the learners’ communicative abilities. We are now in need of a new theory and system of sentence patterns, based on their communicative functions and having actual generating capacities, This new type of sentence patterns may be termed functional sentence patterns.
